Cloudyn Blog

Amazon S3 Growing Wild in Australia

If you read our business intelligence on Amazon EC2 in last week’s blog post, some of you should have been able to boost your AWS computing performance by 30% while keeping your costs the same. Not too shabby for reading a blog post.

S3 Consumption Per Region

Not surprisingly, Amazon’s oldest and most established region, US E1 (North Virginia) hosts 3 times the amount of S3 storage of all the other AWS regions combined. However, S3 consumption, and in particular Glacier usage, is ramping up in other areas quite rapidly.

S3 Surges in Sydney, Australia

When we took a look at our customers in the Asia Pacific region, we noticed that even though the Sydney region was just added this past October, it has already surpassed Singapore and Tokyo combined, both of which are older AWS regions.With over 63% of Asia Pacific S3 consumption coming out of Sydney alone, Australia is clearly ramping up in the cloud. (Incidentally, this matches what we are seeing with more Aussie customers – both SMB and enterprise – signing up for Cloudyn services.)

Glacier Consumption Climbs

While the most common S3 tier is the expensive Standard storage, the Glacier tier, which was just introduced in August 2012, is rapidly gaining popularity. It appears that the main driver for Glacier adoption is its great integration with S3. An automated lifecycle procedure easily moves old S3 objects to Glacier, making it an easy default option for long-term storage.On the other hand, the medium-priced Reduced-Redundancy storage is much less utilized, partly due to a lack of automated procedures for moving standard storage to Reduced-Redundancy, and partly because the savings are not that significant (e.g. for the 1st terabyte of data, per GB standard costs $0.095, reduced redundancy costs $0.076 while Glacier costs just $0.010).

Cut Out Costly S3 Shadow Versions

Shadow versions are S3 objects that even after you delete them or replace them with new versions, are still stored in your bucker and charged for at regular rates. While you can view them, it’s very difficult to do so, hence the name “shadow versions”. This situation leads to companies having excess versions that they don’t know about, don’t need and definitely don’t want to be paying for. Our new S3 Tracker now helps customers save on S3 by uncovering storage inefficiencies, such as these shadow versions. This joins the up to 46% saving opportunities that we’ve been helping our customers identify in their AWS bill for EC2, RDS and EBS.
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